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Killing Iraq With Kindness

One year later, most of the stated reasons for invading Iraq have been discredited. But advocates of the war still have one compelling argument: our troops are not there to impose American values or even Western values, but ''universal'' ones. The underlying assumption is that the United States itself represents these universal values, and that freedom to pursue happiness, to elect our own leaders and to trade in open markets, should be shared by all, regardless of creed, history, race or culture.

Some might question whether America is as shining an example of these good things as is often claimed. Nonetheless, spreading them around is certainly a more appealing policy than propping up ''our'' dictators in the name of realpolitik. Still, history shows that the forceful imposition of even decent ideas in the claim of universalism tends to backfire -- creating not converts but enemies who will do anything to defend their blood and soil.

Such was the response two centuries ago of the German-speaking areas of Europe when Napoleon's armies invaded them under the banner of universal freedom, equality and brotherhood. Napoleon was a despot and his Grande Armée could be brutal, to be sure, but his reforms were mostly beneficial. Religious freedom was established, government efficiency improved, and the Napoleonic legal code has served continental Europeans well for two centuries.

Yet France's armed intervention was deeply resented. Some nativist reactions were relatively benign: romantic poetry celebrating the native soul, or a taste for folkloric roots. But in other cases the native soul, especially in Germany, turned sour and became anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan, and anti-Semitic. Some 19th-century nativists claimed that Napoleon was a Jew. This was not just because he liberated the Jews from their ghettoes and declared that France would be their homeland, but also because universal ideals, promising equality for all, have often been associated by nativists with rootless cosmopolitanism, which in their eyes is synonymous with Jewishness.

As soon as Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the liberal laws he instituted in Prussia were annulled. And a century later, the resentments planted by Napoleon's armed liberation sprouted their most bitter fruits in Nazi Germany.

Arab and Muslim extremism may never become as lethal or powerful as the 20th-century German strain, but it has already taken a terrible toll. Once again a nation with a universalist mission to liberate the world is creating dangerous enemies (and once again Jews are being blamed). This is not necessarily because the Islamic world hates democracy, but because the use of armed force -- combined with the hypocrisy of going after one dictator while coddling others, the arrogant zealotry of some American ideologues and the failures of a ham-handed occupation -- are giving America's democratic mission a bad name.

One problem with American troops' liberating the Middle East is that it confirms the opinions of both Muslims and Westerners who see the Iraq war as part of a religious war, a ''clash of civilizations'' in the phrase of the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. On the face of it, this would seem an unlikely proposition. Saddam Hussein did not rule over an Islamic state. Far from it; he killed large numbers of Muslims. Whatever his values are, it would be an insult to claim they represent Arab civilization. And although Tony Blair (also a fan of the phrase ''universal values'') and George W. Bush are Christians, religion does not appear to have played a major part in their war aims.

Yet to many Arab Muslims inside and outside Iraq, this does indeed look like a war unleashed by ''Zionists and Crusaders'' to keep the Muslims down, or worse, impose a foreign civilization on an Arab nation. This is certainly the way Islamist extemists see it. But then, they always were believers in Mr. Huntington's thesis.

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Islamists, however, do not represent Muslim or Arab civilization -- any more than the Christian Coalition, let alone ''Zionists,'' represents the West. Iraq is a perfect example of how ethnic, religious and cultural fault lines run inside national borders. The future of Iraq is not being forged out of a battle between West and East, or between Muslims and Christians, but between Shiites and Sunnis, Kurds and Arabs, Baathists and democrats. The main fault line crossing most Muslim societies isn't even between secularists and religionists, but between Muslims with different ideas about the proper role of religion.

Islamists of the kind represented by Al Qaeda are religious revolutionaries. But it is perfectly possible for a practicing Muslim to be against United States intervention, free-market capitalism, sexual freedom and the importing of Hollywood movies without being a theocratic revolutionary. Such a person may be a moderate reformer who believes, as did many Europeans until just a few decades ago, that democratic politics is best organized along religious lines.

The real question for the Western universalists, then, is whether the cause of moderate Muslims is helped by the revolutionary war that has been set off by the American and British armies. For that is what the war in Iraq is: not a clash of civilizations, but a revolution unleashed through outside force.

There seems to be little doubt that most Iraqis were more than happy to see Saddam Hussein go. Most would have remained grateful to the United States and Britain, if only the coalition forces could have somehow gone home quickly, leaving Iraq with a functioning administration, electricity, running water and safestreets. This, of course, would not have been possible even if Britain and America had done everything right. The fact that the coalition got so much spectacularly wrong has made things far worse.

Iraq is so violent and chaotic now that it would be highly irresponsible to pull the troops out. As a result, we may be seeing more and more Huntingtonians. This is especially true of Arabs living outside Iraq, who never felt the lash of Saddam Hussein directly.

In the face of what is seen as continued Western aggression, it is harder for Muslims in any country to take a strong stand against fellow Muslims for fear of being branded as traitors. The Liberal Islamic Network, for example, has done a brave job of promoting a moderate form of Islam in Indonesia, where extremists bombed a Bali nightclub in 2002. These liberal Muslims advocate the separation of church and state, and a non-literal interpretation of the Koran. They were able to fight extremism without being seen as American stooges -- until American troops invaded a Muslim country.

''When the Bali bombings occurred, I thought the fundamentalist groups would fade, because people would see that they were wrong,'' according to one member of the group, Nong Darol Mahmada. ''But now the Iraq war becomes a new justification for the fundamentalist attitude toward America or the West. Everything we've been working for -- democracy, freedom of thought -- all seems in vain.'' She may be wrong. All might not be lost. But so far, in Iraq and beyond, the neoconservative mission is achieving the opposite of what it intended.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 17, 2004, on Page A00025 of the National edition with the headline: Killing Iraq With Kindness. Today's Paper|Subscribe